The Ullswater Undertaking by Rebecca Tope (read dune .TXT) 📕

to the end. But he never did, so now he feels bad and Fabian’s latched onto that.’ She patted her fiancé’s leg reassuringly. ‘He just forgot about it by the time he was back in England.’

‘You’ve lost me. I should tell you that Fabian and I have no truck with each other, never have. My boys have kept up with him, on and off, since they were all living close to each other, but I never had any time for him. Sneaky little beast he was, always causing trouble. Made my life a lot harder than it might have been.’

‘Aren’t your boys much younger than Fabian? Why would they have been so close?’

‘Fabian’s fifty-six. Petrock’s forty-eight. Keith’s forty-six. They worshipped him when they were small. My wife went off with them, back to Keswick, when Keith was barely three. Fabian’s dad was good to them all. They were thrown together.’ He shrugged. ‘I was the one left out in the cold.’

‘Fabian asked me to find you,’ Christopher reminded him.

‘Yes – you said. And you’re right, it was all a game, to keep you dancing to his tune. That promise you made, whatever it was, he must be rubbing his hands to think he can tweak your conscience any time he likes.’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I mean – nobody keeps a promise to a dead man, do they? If you thought he was dead, why go to the trouble?’

‘I did mean to,’ said Christopher feebly. ‘At the time. We were in Africa and he had sleeping sickness. Everyone was sure he was dying.’

‘Take a lot to kill the little rat. My wife used to say he was just like his mother, when she first knew him.’

Simmy sat up straighter. Here was a gap she’d hoped would be filled. ‘Did she?’ she said.

Richmond sighed. ‘Her and Fabian’s mum were cousins, funnily enough. Very alike in their characters. And they died within six months of each other. There’s a genetic thing they’d both inherited. Don’t ask me for details. Seems none of the boys have got it, luckily.’

‘And you’ve known Josephine a long time,’ Simmy pressed on, making the inevitable connection.

The man nodded miserably. ‘The best woman in the world, bar none. How some evil swine could kill her I shall never know. There’s nothing she could ever have done to deserve that.’

‘Nobody deserves to be murdered,’ said Simmy, with a determined glance at her little son. How he came into it she could not have explained, but he did.

‘We’ve been thinking a lot about that,’ said Christopher. ‘We’ve got this young friend, you see, who’s a bit of an amateur detective. He and Simmy have been quite closely involved in a number of murders over the past couple of years, and this boy—’

‘Ben Harkness, right,’ nodded Richmond carelessly. ‘We all know about him.’

‘He found your address,’ said Simmy defensively. ‘Took him two minutes. And he unearthed Hilda’s secret. There’s nothing he can’t ferret out on the Internet. It’s like magic.’

‘Hilda’s secret? What’s that then?’ The man seemed determined not to appear interested. ‘You don’t want to believe everything on the Internet, you know.’

Something about his tone gave Simmy pause, and with another warning pat on Christopher’s leg, she just shrugged. ‘Well, it’s probably not what Fabian was talking about anyway. What do you think of Petrock writing her life story? Is it going to be a bestseller? She does seem to have done a lot of remarkable things through the years.’

‘Don’t ask me. I never even met the woman.’ Again, he spoke with a studied nonchalance that was not convincing.

‘What? How is that even possible when she was your big sister? And you must have lived in Keswick if your boys went to school there. Just a few miles away.’ She frowned. ‘What happened?’ she asked simply.

‘Long story.’ He brandished his stumpy arm. ‘Has to do with this. And don’t you get that Harkness kid onto investigating it, because he won’t find anything.’

Embarrassment silenced both Simmy and Christopher for half a minute, before Simmy’s curiosity broke through. ‘You don’t wear a prosthesis, then? No bionic hand or anything?’

‘Tried it for a bit when I was younger. Never got on with it. People stared at that even more than they did at the stump, and asked the same questions a million times. You can go off people very quickly, you know.’ He smiled tightly, and tucked the arm back where it had been before.

‘At the risk of asking one of those annoying questions – were you born with it like that?’ asked Christopher.

Simmy did a rapid calculation, thinking Richmond must be too old to have been a thalidomide baby. Could you be born with a truncated limb like that? She doubted it.

‘Hospital error. I was a C-section delivery, as they call it now, big emergency, and the surgeon’s knife slipped. Severed blood vessels and tendons and they couldn’t save the arm. So, yes, in a manner of speaking, I was born with it.’

‘That’s terrible!’ Simmy declared, thinking of how her mother would react to such a tale. It took very little to enrage Angie Straw against the health service, for her usual perverse reasons. It was certainly true that when they did make mistakes, they made them on a grand scale.

‘I don’t want to go into it. It’s not relevant to anything, except to say that it meant I never grew up as part of the family. I had a good foster mother from the start, and never realised she wasn’t my real mum until I was about ten. I had the Armitage surname, and she was called Forrest and eventually I asked her why that was.’

‘Did she have a husband?’

‘Actually, yes. Angus. He worked away a lot and never seemed to take much notice of me. I called him Dad and he did take me fishing now and then, and rowing on Derwentwater once or twice. A harmless sort of chap.’

‘So – do you know who your biological parents were?’